I don't know. I think one of the reasons that she picked me as the legal authority in her medical care, should she become incapacitated, was because she trusted me to be compassionate and concerned...and also to be a righteous bastard should it be necesarry.
She and I disagreed on a lot of things in life, but never on stuff like that. Living is about a lot more than just having a pulse.
It is interesting. Obviously, I got a lot of time to think about it. In my mother's case it was pretty clear-cut...She had surgery, which came back with the diagnosis of a Type IV Astrocytoma (Glioblastoma Multiforme), which is pretty much the worst thing you can have in your head. the survival curve looks like the flight path of a 747 with no wings, and the x-axis of the graph is measured in months. So right there you're looking at a bad situation.
In the end it didn't matter, because she ended up having multiple bleeds as after effects of the (otherwise successful) surgery, which left her a tiny step above vegetable.
The combination of factors meant that the idea of long term prognosis was a joke. She couldn't go through the sort of treatment that would slow the tumor down at all. She was going to die. End of story.
Hmmmm...this is interesting. At the time I'd have wholeheartedly supported a lethal dose of morphine or something similar, but in retrospect I find I can't make an argument in support of the idea. I don't know. In my mother's case there really wasn't any pain anyway, so mercy is not a factor. In a situation with another terminal cancer of a painful sort (bone cancer, for example), it seems like the better part of mercy to spare the terminal patient pain.
I think in the end, it's just such a can of worms, it's better to let things take their course semi-naturally with medication to relieve pain, than to go in and muck with things. I can only imagine the lawsuits that would arise if the average person was allowed to decide in a medical setting, how long the terminal patient should live. These days, with medical costs being what they are, there is too much potential for scary expediency.
I have a living will which says, that if I'm in a persistent vegitative state with no reasonable hope of recovery, I want my loved ones, or the goddamn government, to pull the plug. Because, at that point, I don't call it living.
My mother had the most straightforward approach to dying of anyone I've ever seen. She found out she had a tumor, she went out and got a living will and a medical power of attourney, and she gave them both to me and specifically told me under what circumstances I was allowed to put her on tubes. And by God I did exactly what she asked. She met her death with courage and dignity, and she trusted me to make that possible for her, and not to stick her on those goddamn machines.
And I don't need some filthy little quasi-moralistic cocksucker who has no fucking idea what he's talking about DARING to give me shit about it. I hope to God you end up trapped in a rotting shell of a body by your own goddamn living will that forbids anyone from touching your precious precious tubes.
Yea, it's a bad review. It's sounds more like he's just not competent to use Beta level products. A lot of people aren't. Most Beta software has tons of interesting problems.
My mother recently died in a similar manner; she was non-responsive, but not brain dead, and I asked that tubes be removed. She had zero chance of short-term meaningful recovery, and the long term was terminal brain cancer (the survival rate 96% of healthy patients her age was 2-6 months. The other 4% were dead in 10 months). She left very specific instructions regarding this possible eventuality (they included the words "Get Dr. Kervorkian"), so there was little debate from the rest of the family (none from the doctors).
I think you'll find that most patients die of pneumonia brought on by the morphine, and not by starvation. I sat by her bed for 10 days, and I can vouch for the level of comfort provided by the physicians...if her body showed any signs of distress, and we're talking elevated heart rate here, they took steps.
It is only a cruel way to die for the people who have to watch.
Emacs? I can only assume you meant CTRL-X/V/C/S, because that's the only emacs-like thing out there...And it's not emacs. It's pretty much standard across all GUI word processors. Cut/Paste/Copy/Save
In Emacs that's CTRL-W/CTRL-Y/META-W/CTRL-X-CTRL-S
Computer literacy is one of those things that covers a lot of ground. In my mind, this includes a basic familarity with hardware. A savvy individual should be able to plug in a new network card, or a new hard drive. These are not advanced hardware tasks. I also think a certain amount of hardware troubleshooting is needed; a user should be able to tell if they have a dead network conntection, or a dead monitor, or a dead computer (or a dead mouse...yes, I've talked to people who can't tell. One lady even triumphantly told me that not only had she replaced the mouse (four times, according to her), she had also replaced the mouse pad. Her problem was a mouse problem, and it was fixed by replacing the mouse).
As far as software, I think computer literacy means needing to be able to figure out a piece of out-of-the-box software. Not the ability to use word or office, or whatever, but the ability to sit down in front of an unfamiliar piece of software, and fiddle with it in an intelligent way. The ability to look up a manual and read it.
It's not about being a power user. Not everyone is a power user. Most people aren't, really. It's really, in my mind, just about not being helpless when confronted with something new.
Absolutely. Put in an executive summary, and you can pretty much fill the rest of the report with hardcore tech jargon. Generally I put in a summary page, then a mid-level summary that is light on the jargon, and then I just append a slimmed-down version of the raw data to the end.
Welllllll, and this is my own opinion here, but I wouldn't buy either one. There are so many free php/mysql resources, you're pretty much going to be throwing your money away unless you really don't know anything about programming languages or relational databases.
Php.org has got some great language resources. mySQL.com...eh, not as good, but decent if you have a basic grasp of SQL.
Stupid anyway. I work for a media outlet, and whenever one of our stories gets picked up by a news site like/., our page traffic goes through the roof. So, assuming we're/.'ed I don't really have a problem with someone pasting text, and, assuming that the site is password protected, clearly they don't care about their page traffic.
That's pretty much my point, really. You liked it, you read it, you learned to be able to read it as literature, rather than as an exercise in intellectual cryptography.
That's one of the great values of literature, in my mind. The old stuff is much more subtle than most literature you find these days. It's rare that I read a modern novel without picking up on the "twist" they think they're subtly leading up to.
Ironically, I did just the opposite. I find writing code more satisfying than writing fiction/non-fiction, because code can be measured on a more objective level by people who are (usually) more interested in functionality than in their own personal prejudices.
So, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that you prefer unknown works by authors before the 1950's that lacked the staying power to make it to the modern age? I jsut assumed we were using the word classics to account for all early period literature that is still popular in the modern day, rather than the more official definition of classics, which I felt was unlikely.
Please, if you will, enlighten me on this non-classics literature from before 1950 that you believe to be more valuable than what is more usually considered classic.
Well, I don't forsee a rash of bloggers rushing out to crib chunks of Moby Dick. And clearly, when they correctly cite their sources, it's not plagarism.
On the other hand, with the internet cash flow model being built around page views, it is clearly dishonest for a blogger to simply copy-paste someone else's content on their own site.
Someone who is actually creating their own content would be satisfied with a hyperlink...for them to be pasting huge chunks of material, suggests to me that they have a simple (and intellectually dishonest) profit motive.
On the other hand, I do like the occasional full article text post, but I think that should only be in the comments, and only where there is a link in the top-level post, which is either restricted (i.e. WSJ, NYT, AJC, etc) or Slashdotted.
Either way I think a content provider could make a solid case for copyright infringement. If I printed my own copy of someone else's book with a citation at the beginning stating that all that follows comes from this other book, then I'm clearly ripping them off.
A lot of people say Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness are wildly divergent, but I thought that Coppola did such a good job of holding on to the feeling of the story, that surreal craziness...Makes me want to go read it again.
Lord Jim, on the other hand...The book is split into two parts, Jim's fall, and Jim's redemption, and the fall part is boring as hell.
Yea, it's a funny story. It does drag in places, but there is a lot of humor built in to it. I think the big part of the problem is that a lot of people never got to the reading comprehension level that you need to appreciate humor in densely written prose.
Always amused me with Shakespeare. The man was a master of raunchy humor. But 90% of the world misses it. I had a copy of Hamlet from 50 years ago, in which the over-zealous editors had tried to remove the sex humor in various places. These days, they wouldn't have to bother.
How can anyone with a halfway open mind despise all of literature written before 1950? What the hell was the point in getting a degree in english with an attitude like that?
That just goes to show how little of the cannon you've read. I've got no problem with pop fiction, but Terry Pratchett, though fun to read, is brain candy at best.
If nothing else, reading lit from another period will increase your vocab, and your ability to comprehend ideas expressed in complex language.
Meh. Video games are too new to be the root of the problem. Look back to TV and radio, and the declining importance put on literacy by schools.
Lot of people in this thread have said it already...Too much emphasis is put on "getting through" this period or that period of classic literature, and too little is put into fundamentals. I can't remember having quality grammar or analysis of structured argument in any high school course, and its wasn't in any of my required courses in college either.
It wasn't in any of my required courses. Did I mention I have a BA in english?
Don't be too quick to blame games. A lot of games require more reading than TV does.
I never understood how anyone could not like "Heart of Darkness". I can see not being able to wade through "Lord Jim", or some of the more cumbersome short fiction...but man, "Heart of Darkness" was one of the few things I ever got assigned in an english class that I fricking loved.
Well, if we take it for granted that all things in nature were produced by evolution, there are many examples of creatures and attributes that are neither simple nor efficient. Wisdom teeth, tonsils, the appendix. Giant Sloths, the Platypus, the Dodo.
Somewhere back in the day, some monkey picked up a stick, and used it to beat the crap out of some other monkey. The stick monkey prospered, and picked up attributes that went with stick use...One of the most interesting parts of tool user is tool recognition. What happened in the monkey brain that made it able to recognize a stick as something other than a stick? What made it able to realize that one stick was better than another for a purpose? What next step occurred when it realized that the best stick yet was a stick with something pointy strapped on the end?
Now that is complex evolution! Forget this "walking on two legs" crap. The thing is, however, the thing that a lot of anti-evolution people don't get is that there is no reason some incredibly worthless trait couldn't get passed along with the good stuff. If it happened that all the tool using monkeys all had blue eyes, then blue eyes would be passed along. If they all had a genetic disorder that made them keel over dead at 30, that was passed along as well.
These days, as decendants of tool using uncles of monkeys, we've had a lot of selection go in our favor. Our brains, in particular have evolved well beyond our cousins, despite the problems it causes with childbirth. Why? Because big brained monkeys like us are hellishly competent predators. Claws, hooves? Who needs 'em! Look at the crap we built to make up for not having them!
The brain comes up with some pretty good stuff: the wheel, electricity, pr0n. The brain also comes up with some pretty dumb stuff: committees, boy bands, flourescent green pigs. This stuff, in my mind, is all proof for evolution...What kind of designer would ever have put in crap like that? It's got to be random noise in the mix.
The point is specialization. Humans, for whatever reason, specialized in tool use as a means for survival. We learned to see the environment as something to be manipulated. Abstract thought became an advantage, so it prospered in our evolution, and we adapted to it. Art is an outgrowth of abstract thought and tool use. Doesn't serve any purpose really, it just happens to be a side-effect of the kind of brain that could produce gunpowder.
Ants, on the other hand, are pretty near perfect. They are utterly dominant in their niche, amazingly successful. The ongoing ant-ian evolution involves coming up with new and exciting ways to be dominant in their niche. Better venom, better reproductive turnaround, better coordination, ability to survive in other environments. The ability to create art is hilariously useless to them. Advanced cognition is hilariously useless. Can you imagine the worker ants going on strick because they don't get enough nectar, or get sent into too many hazardous situations? Any ant that started evolving in that direction would be less fit to live, an evolutionary flop.
Intelligence is not the end-all be-all in evolution. Why are chimps not intelligent artisans like us? Maybe because they climb trees better than we do. Why not? They didn't need to pick up tool use, because they could out-climb all their predators, whereas we had to have a big ass club up in the tree with us because panthers could climb better.
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I don't know. I think one of the reasons that she picked me as the legal authority in her medical care, should she become incapacitated, was because she trusted me to be compassionate and concerned...and also to be a righteous bastard should it be necesarry.
She and I disagreed on a lot of things in life, but never on stuff like that. Living is about a lot more than just having a pulse.
It is interesting. Obviously, I got a lot of time to think about it. In my mother's case it was pretty clear-cut...She had surgery, which came back with the diagnosis of a Type IV Astrocytoma (Glioblastoma Multiforme), which is pretty much the worst thing you can have in your head. the survival curve looks like the flight path of a 747 with no wings, and the x-axis of the graph is measured in months. So right there you're looking at a bad situation.
In the end it didn't matter, because she ended up having multiple bleeds as after effects of the (otherwise successful) surgery, which left her a tiny step above vegetable.
The combination of factors meant that the idea of long term prognosis was a joke. She couldn't go through the sort of treatment that would slow the tumor down at all. She was going to die. End of story.
Hmmmm...this is interesting. At the time I'd have wholeheartedly supported a lethal dose of morphine or something similar, but in retrospect I find I can't make an argument in support of the idea. I don't know. In my mother's case there really wasn't any pain anyway, so mercy is not a factor. In a situation with another terminal cancer of a painful sort (bone cancer, for example), it seems like the better part of mercy to spare the terminal patient pain.
I think in the end, it's just such a can of worms, it's better to let things take their course semi-naturally with medication to relieve pain, than to go in and muck with things. I can only imagine the lawsuits that would arise if the average person was allowed to decide in a medical setting, how long the terminal patient should live. These days, with medical costs being what they are, there is too much potential for scary expediency.
I have a living will which says, that if I'm in a persistent vegitative state with no reasonable hope of recovery, I want my loved ones, or the goddamn government, to pull the plug. Because, at that point, I don't call it living.
My mother had the most straightforward approach to dying of anyone I've ever seen. She found out she had a tumor, she went out and got a living will and a medical power of attourney, and she gave them both to me and specifically told me under what circumstances I was allowed to put her on tubes. And by God I did exactly what she asked. She met her death with courage and dignity, and she trusted me to make that possible for her, and not to stick her on those goddamn machines.
And I don't need some filthy little quasi-moralistic cocksucker who has no fucking idea what he's talking about DARING to give me shit about it. I hope to God you end up trapped in a rotting shell of a body by your own goddamn living will that forbids anyone from touching your precious precious tubes.
Yea, it's a bad review. It's sounds more like he's just not competent to use Beta level products. A lot of people aren't. Most Beta software has tons of interesting problems.
My mother recently died in a similar manner; she was non-responsive, but not brain dead, and I asked that tubes be removed. She had zero chance of short-term meaningful recovery, and the long term was terminal brain cancer (the survival rate 96% of healthy patients her age was 2-6 months. The other 4% were dead in 10 months). She left very specific instructions regarding this possible eventuality (they included the words "Get Dr. Kervorkian"), so there was little debate from the rest of the family (none from the doctors).
I think you'll find that most patients die of pneumonia brought on by the morphine, and not by starvation. I sat by her bed for 10 days, and I can vouch for the level of comfort provided by the physicians...if her body showed any signs of distress, and we're talking elevated heart rate here, they took steps.
It is only a cruel way to die for the people who have to watch.
Heh. It's actually kinda funny too. I plead 14 hour workday as my excuse.
--A
Emacs? I can only assume you meant CTRL-X/V/C/S, because that's the only emacs-like thing out there...And it's not emacs. It's pretty much standard across all GUI word processors. Cut/Paste/Copy/Save
In Emacs that's CTRL-W/CTRL-Y/META-W/CTRL-X-CTRL-S
Computer literacy is one of those things that covers a lot of ground. In my mind, this includes a basic familarity with hardware. A savvy individual should be able to plug in a new network card, or a new hard drive. These are not advanced hardware tasks. I also think a certain amount of hardware troubleshooting is needed; a user should be able to tell if they have a dead network conntection, or a dead monitor, or a dead computer (or a dead mouse...yes, I've talked to people who can't tell. One lady even triumphantly told me that not only had she replaced the mouse (four times, according to her), she had also replaced the mouse pad. Her problem was a mouse problem, and it was fixed by replacing the mouse).
As far as software, I think computer literacy means needing to be able to figure out a piece of out-of-the-box software. Not the ability to use word or office, or whatever, but the ability to sit down in front of an unfamiliar piece of software, and fiddle with it in an intelligent way. The ability to look up a manual and read it.
It's not about being a power user. Not everyone is a power user. Most people aren't, really. It's really, in my mind, just about not being helpless when confronted with something new.
Absolutely. Put in an executive summary, and you can pretty much fill the rest of the report with hardcore tech jargon. Generally I put in a summary page, then a mid-level summary that is light on the jargon, and then I just append a slimmed-down version of the raw data to the end.
It generally meets with approval.
Welllllll, and this is my own opinion here, but I wouldn't buy either one. There are so many free php/mysql resources, you're pretty much going to be throwing your money away unless you really don't know anything about programming languages or relational databases.
Php.org has got some great language resources. mySQL.com...eh, not as good, but decent if you have a basic grasp of SQL.
Might want to try this one, which was reviewed on /. about 2 hours ago.
Stupid anyway. I work for a media outlet, and whenever one of our stories gets picked up by a news site like /., our page traffic goes through the roof. So, assuming we're /.'ed I don't really have a problem with someone pasting text, and, assuming that the site is password protected, clearly they don't care about their page traffic.
That's pretty much my point, really. You liked it, you read it, you learned to be able to read it as literature, rather than as an exercise in intellectual cryptography.
That's one of the great values of literature, in my mind. The old stuff is much more subtle than most literature you find these days. It's rare that I read a modern novel without picking up on the "twist" they think they're subtly leading up to.
Ironically, I did just the opposite. I find writing code more satisfying than writing fiction/non-fiction, because code can be measured on a more objective level by people who are (usually) more interested in functionality than in their own personal prejudices.
So, if I understand you correctly, you are saying that you prefer unknown works by authors before the 1950's that lacked the staying power to make it to the modern age? I jsut assumed we were using the word classics to account for all early period literature that is still popular in the modern day, rather than the more official definition of classics, which I felt was unlikely.
Please, if you will, enlighten me on this non-classics literature from before 1950 that you believe to be more valuable than what is more usually considered classic.
I think it's more likely the reason it's becoming a problem. :/
Well, I don't forsee a rash of bloggers rushing out to crib chunks of Moby Dick. And clearly, when they correctly cite their sources, it's not plagarism.
On the other hand, with the internet cash flow model being built around page views, it is clearly dishonest for a blogger to simply copy-paste someone else's content on their own site.
Someone who is actually creating their own content would be satisfied with a hyperlink...for them to be pasting huge chunks of material, suggests to me that they have a simple (and intellectually dishonest) profit motive.
On the other hand, I do like the occasional full article text post, but I think that should only be in the comments, and only where there is a link in the top-level post, which is either restricted (i.e. WSJ, NYT, AJC, etc) or Slashdotted.
Either way I think a content provider could make a solid case for copyright infringement. If I printed my own copy of someone else's book with a citation at the beginning stating that all that follows comes from this other book, then I'm clearly ripping them off.
A lot of people say Apocalypse Now and Heart of Darkness are wildly divergent, but I thought that Coppola did such a good job of holding on to the feeling of the story, that surreal craziness...Makes me want to go read it again.
Lord Jim, on the other hand...The book is split into two parts, Jim's fall, and Jim's redemption, and the fall part is boring as hell.
Yea, it's a funny story. It does drag in places, but there is a lot of humor built in to it. I think the big part of the problem is that a lot of people never got to the reading comprehension level that you need to appreciate humor in densely written prose.
Always amused me with Shakespeare. The man was a master of raunchy humor. But 90% of the world misses it. I had a copy of Hamlet from 50 years ago, in which the over-zealous editors had tried to remove the sex humor in various places. These days, they wouldn't have to bother.
How can anyone with a halfway open mind despise all of literature written before 1950? What the hell was the point in getting a degree in english with an attitude like that?
I'm going with "sarcasm", and I'm amused at how many people responding to you utterly missed it. Q.E.D.
That just goes to show how little of the cannon you've read. I've got no problem with pop fiction, but Terry Pratchett, though fun to read, is brain candy at best.
If nothing else, reading lit from another period will increase your vocab, and your ability to comprehend ideas expressed in complex language.
Meh. Video games are too new to be the root of the problem. Look back to TV and radio, and the declining importance put on literacy by schools.
Lot of people in this thread have said it already...Too much emphasis is put on "getting through" this period or that period of classic literature, and too little is put into fundamentals. I can't remember having quality grammar or analysis of structured argument in any high school course, and its wasn't in any of my required courses in college either.
It wasn't in any of my required courses. Did I mention I have a BA in english?
Don't be too quick to blame games. A lot of games require more reading than TV does.
I never understood how anyone could not like "Heart of Darkness". I can see not being able to wade through "Lord Jim", or some of the more cumbersome short fiction...but man, "Heart of Darkness" was one of the few things I ever got assigned in an english class that I fricking loved.
Well, if we take it for granted that all things in nature were produced by evolution, there are many examples of creatures and attributes that are neither simple nor efficient. Wisdom teeth, tonsils, the appendix. Giant Sloths, the Platypus, the Dodo.
Somewhere back in the day, some monkey picked up a stick, and used it to beat the crap out of some other monkey. The stick monkey prospered, and picked up attributes that went with stick use...One of the most interesting parts of tool user is tool recognition. What happened in the monkey brain that made it able to recognize a stick as something other than a stick? What made it able to realize that one stick was better than another for a purpose? What next step occurred when it realized that the best stick yet was a stick with something pointy strapped on the end?
Now that is complex evolution! Forget this "walking on two legs" crap. The thing is, however, the thing that a lot of anti-evolution people don't get is that there is no reason some incredibly worthless trait couldn't get passed along with the good stuff. If it happened that all the tool using monkeys all had blue eyes, then blue eyes would be passed along. If they all had a genetic disorder that made them keel over dead at 30, that was passed along as well.
These days, as decendants of tool using uncles of monkeys, we've had a lot of selection go in our favor. Our brains, in particular have evolved well beyond our cousins, despite the problems it causes with childbirth. Why? Because big brained monkeys like us are hellishly competent predators. Claws, hooves? Who needs 'em! Look at the crap we built to make up for not having them!
The brain comes up with some pretty good stuff: the wheel, electricity, pr0n. The brain also comes up with some pretty dumb stuff: committees, boy bands, flourescent green pigs. This stuff, in my mind, is all proof for evolution...What kind of designer would ever have put in crap like that? It's got to be random noise in the mix.
The point is specialization. Humans, for whatever reason, specialized in tool use as a means for survival. We learned to see the environment as something to be manipulated. Abstract thought became an advantage, so it prospered in our evolution, and we adapted to it. Art is an outgrowth of abstract thought and tool use. Doesn't serve any purpose really, it just happens to be a side-effect of the kind of brain that could produce gunpowder.
Ants, on the other hand, are pretty near perfect. They are utterly dominant in their niche, amazingly successful. The ongoing ant-ian evolution involves coming up with new and exciting ways to be dominant in their niche. Better venom, better reproductive turnaround, better coordination, ability to survive in other environments. The ability to create art is hilariously useless to them. Advanced cognition is hilariously useless. Can you imagine the worker ants going on strick because they don't get enough nectar, or get sent into too many hazardous situations? Any ant that started evolving in that direction would be less fit to live, an evolutionary flop.
Intelligence is not the end-all be-all in evolution. Why are chimps not intelligent artisans like us? Maybe because they climb trees better than we do. Why not? They didn't need to pick up tool use, because they could out-climb all their predators, whereas we had to have a big ass club up in the tree with us because panthers could climb better.